I've been watching these discussions for a while now and finally felt obliged to create an account an step in. There appear to be quite a few people on here with legitimate grievances. @LiveCoin's typical response is to consistently bully people by pointing out how they failed to read or understand the User Agreement. Don't be bullied, this isn't a valid answer, and the User Agreement isn't a valid document (see below). Don't let the bullying get to you, you have rights.
@LiveCoin in my opinion represents a criminal organisation. I'm confident they will soon go the way of BTC-e and will be shut down by the authorities. Unfortunately this means their clients will have their funds seized and will have no recourse to get them back - you have been warned,
get out now. There are plenty of alternatives, honest companies who look after their users and who don't conceal their identities.
Let's examine what's been said:
If we send all our news to all our customers, our mail servers would be overloaded and blocked in no time, and nobody would receive any newsletters from us at all.
This is utter nonsense. Unless the people behind the website are totally incompetent, which is clearly a possibility (and if true you should withdraw your funds anyway). Sending a large volume of email does not mean you will be blocked, that is simply a lie. Stating that your servers would get overloaded is a clear sign that you don't understand the basic technology; just add more servers. In addition, no-one expects you to send all news to all customers (unless they opt in to that). But if a customer has traded a coin that is being delisted, or holds a coin that is being delisted, then of course they should be sent a mail about that. And after it is delisted, there is no reason to remove the customers access to those funds. Providing access to delisted wallets costs you almost nothing. The same goes for changing a customers deposit address, just send them an email. And if they ignore the email and discover their mistake later put in place a way for them to recover funds - even if they need to pay a fee. By not doing this you are simply stealing from these people and when the authorities find out you will be arrested, imprisoned and the service will be shut down (more below on how you can help achieve this).
We didn't conseal anything, all the news are posted to be freely accessible
You clearly use the news feed to hide and obscure extremely important from your customers. Why would someone who has only traded say ETH/USD care about PIN/BTC or MAID for example. Your tedious reply of
blah blah stated very clearly in the User agreement blah is not a defence. Your user agreement is invalid because you use it to execute predatory business practices on innocent users. You make the service so difficult for some people to understand that your strategy of systematic theft is blatantly clear.
in case of a mistake, the funds would be irrevocably lost
More lies, this one is a whopper (ignoring any case where the wrong currency was sent to a wallet - this can't usually be rectified). The funds are on the blockchain! You have the keys to the wallets, in fact some users appear to have witnessed funds being removed from their wallets without them being credited to their account. These funds have been stolen, I just can't see another way to look at this.
If you are reading this please understand -
this company (who ever they are) is stealing people's funds. They will be shut down without notice when the authorities catch up with them. You will lose your funds if you don't withdraw them in time (trade with someone like Binance who are moving to the EU where your funds are protected by law). There is no conceivable reason that they wouldn't put in place some remedial action to help those users who (in their words) have made a mistake, unless of course this was a business strategy - to steal from innocent customers.
What's more noticeable is the questions that @LiveCoin isn't answering. They have clearly been asked about the true identity of the legal entity behind the company and where it is registered. Why won't they answer this simple question? Because they are trying to hide their identity. They even publish misinformation on the site about that identity. The company the claim to be doesn't exist, and as far as I can tell even their CEO Ivona Zlatova doesn't exist.
Are you are still reading? why?? Stop now and empty your account!
Having said all of this, the most important reason that I am very confident that this exchange will be shut down is their lack of audibility. They delete their user data after 30 days making it a go-to exchange for criminals and tax evaders. Like BTC-e this is a HUGE red flag for authorities all over the world. There's absolutely no technical reason to delete this data. Storage is incredibly cheap and very easy. The only reason I can think of is either technological incompetence or a business strategy to attract organised crime to the exchange. They are making it unnecessarily difficult for honest users to fill in accurate tax reports because they put the responsibility for storing the data on the users. And yes
blah blah stated very clearly in the User agreement blah, but for what purpose? The user agreement is invalid as it has so many nefarious clauses designed to punish innocent customers and help criminals.
@LiveCoin why do you hate your customers so much?
So, who can you do..?
Firstly, enable other users to contact you on this site (profile >> Personal Message Options >> Allow newbies to send you PMs), and start a conversation on
https://www.reddit.com/r/livecoin/ . Then...
1. if you have a legitimate grievance with the exchange (sending the wrong coin to the wrong wallet is an example of a true, unrecoverable user error on your part - sorry) then obviously raise a support ticket but not until you have emptied all funds from your account because it appears that they are likely to shut you down. And
take screen shots of any responses you might get.
2. Go to the authorities.
In Europe you can report fraud to Europol (
https://www.europol.europa.eu/report-a-crime/report-cybercrime-online). With enough complaints they will take action, although I strongly suspect that is already in progress. The authorities may ask you for evidence, so collect it before the exchange kicks you out. Remember they delete all customer data regularly, so keep records. Keep your emails, support tickets and download your transaction data regularly.
In the US you need to alert the FBI via the stopfraud.gov website (
https://www.wikihow.com/Report-Fraud-to-the-FBI). It was the FBI who took down BTC-e, they are extremely aggressive against entities they suspect of aiding or taking part in tax avoidance. Again, collect information of the fraud committed against you. They got the man in charge of BTC-e the second he stepped onto EU soil.
To really get their attention tell them that you suspect them of aiding tax avoidance. There is a sample letter below.
3. Spread the word on social media
The exchange has a twitter account, find the people who are following, retweeting or liking their tweets and bring this conversion to their attention. Be polite, honest and accurate. Don't use threatening or abusive language.
Contact the press. There's a lot of interest in crypto currency news and you might find it isn't too difficult to find a journalist who is willing to help investigate the company. As well as the crypto-news websites, try classic news outlets too, they tend to have bigger budgets.
Ask @LiveCoin on this site again and again - what's the legal entity behind the website and where are they registered?
4. Report them to facebook, twitter, google, bing etc. All these services have mechanisms for people to report sites and accounts that you suspect are fraudulent. Again, you would need to do this in numbers. Don't expect someone to do it for you. Tell them your concerns, again be honest, provide proof. It's in their interests to protect customers. The site looks like it's on a trajectory to go out of business anyway, but you can help to hurry this up which in turn will protect future customers from getting robbed.
5. Lawyer up! The big problem here of course is that the company behind the exchange is unknown, so there's no one to sue. If anyone knows who the legal entity is there are people who would be willing to pay for this information. Did you used to work there? Can you help?
Personally you might not have lost enough to pay for a legal case against them, but collectively I bet you have. I've heard of people who have had tens of thousands of dollars stolen from them. This site isn't the right place to discuss a collective law suit though, again I suggest starting at
https://www.reddit.com/r/livecoin.
6. Move to another exchange.
The prices on livecoin simply aren't that good. I have access to aggregated price data from almost every exchange in the world and even after you deduct fee's the prices on this exchange are not competitive. They just don't have the liquidity. Coupled with the fact that they engage in such terrible business practices, they demonstrably don't understand technology very well, they hide their legal identity, they delete your data and they might steal from you. You may disagree, because so far your haven't been a victim, but several people have been victim and you might be next. And for no good reason - just move to a safer exchange, with less downtime, a better website, a mobile app, better prices and better support.
Finally, here's an example note that you might send to a regulator or authority...
Dear Regulator/Authority/Google/Twitter
I would like to bring to your attention the cryptocurrency exchange website https://livecoin.net which I suspect of being a run by a criminal organisation. I have proof that they have defrauded me and I understand several other customers have the same complaint. They claim that they are behaving in line with their terms and conditions, which maybe true, but I believe those terms and conditions are designed to confuse customers into making costly financial mistakes.
I failed to read one obscure news article hidden amongst literally hundreds of others (non of which were relevant to me). The exchange took advantage of this and seized funds to the value of XXXXXUSD. I have challenged them and even offered to pay a fee to manually rectify the situation, but as you can see from the documents attached they have refused. I understand that I will probably never see my funds again, but I would like to bring this to your attention in order that you could possibly help to stop livecoin from carrying out the same predatory business practices on other innocent individuals.
Additional, since joining this site I have learned that they delete all customer records regularly, meaning there is no financial audit trail. This makes it difficult for honest customers like myself to file accurate tax returns. And of course this makes the exchange an attractive destination for tax evaders and organised criminals.
I don't know why entities like this are allowed to exist, why they appear on search engine results next to other, more honest and open businesses, or why they are allowed to operate on social media sites. They appear to prey on innocent customers, changing the rules regularly in order to catch people out and seize their funds - all in accordance to their Terms and Conditions.
Regards
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